Category: Bhutan

Bhutan’s traditional religious paintings appear in many places. Trucks bear the image of the lotus (padma or pema). The tiger, the snow lion, the dragon and the Yamantaka are seen in murals in temples as well as people’s homes. Dzongs, monasteries and temples contain magnificent murals. A sampling of these is in the gallery below (click to see a slideshow).

Taktsang monastery, near Paro, is situated at an elevation of 3120 meters. The first view of it is spectacular (see the featured photo). But when I reached the base of the climb and saw the monastery hanging on a cliff a kilometre above me, my heart sank. My shoes were bad, and I was physically out of condition. I told The Family I would not be able to climb.

She wanted to do it, and The Sullen Celt assured her that it was an easy walk. I was not convinced, since The Sullen Celt is a trekker and is unable to compensate for other people’s lack of fitness. Someone else said that the group of buildings that we could see part of the way up included a cafeteria with a great view of the monastery. I allowed myself to be persuaded by The Family that I could sit and have a coffee there while the rest of the gang climbed. The first twenty paces were a little bit of steep rock, but then the path became a dirt track, as you can see in this photo. This would become of great consequence on our way down.

The initial climb was less hard than I’d expected. Previous travellers had dawdled during the climb through the rhododendron forest. We saw several small stacks of carefully balanced stone. It is reassuring when you see that someone sat down at a point where the climb was beginning to get steep and caught her breath doing something slow. I recently read a diatribe against them, and found myself agreeing. However, Bhutan teaches you the art of balance: the whole landscape of the country is a lesson in how to live in nature without overwhelming it.

We left behind the forest bright with red rhododendron flowers and climbed higher. This was the realm of blue pines (Pinus wallichiana). As the road steepened, I had a lovely view of the monastery through the pines. It did not seem to be any closer.

Takstang monastery was built by the fourth king of Bhutan, Tenzin Rabgye, in a site that was already holy. The legend of this place, called Taktsang Phelug (Tiger’s nest), is that the Guru Padmasambhava converted a Tibetan princess to Buddhism. She took the form of a tigress and flew with the Guru to this place. There he meditated, and emerged in eight different forms to subdue demons. The tsechu here has been used many times to consolidate national feelings. The first king, Ngawang Namgyal (also known as Shabdrung Rinpoche), performed the tsechu here in 1644 at the beginning of the war against Tibet, and invoked the story of the Guru as a metaphor for the war. His wish to build a temple here was finally fulfilled when Tenzin Rabgye declared the start of the works in the tsechu of 1692.

Clouds were massing over the mountain, and flowing slowly down its sides as we climbed. The light was now worse, but it made the pine forest into a magical kingdom. Many of the trees were covered thick with orchids. We came to the point where the road to the cafeteria branched off. By now our group of climbers had stretched into a long thin line. If I went off to have coffee I would leave The Family to do the climb alone. Better prepared walkers would have no problem with this, but both of us were terribly out of shape that day, almost exactly a decade ago. So we decided to stick together. At this time I thought that the hard work was done, and it would not be much longer before we reached the monastery. So we went on.

There was a little temple, a Lhakhang, nearby. I paused to take photos of the four sacred animals painted by a local artist. From left to right you can see a tiger, a snow lion, a Yamantaka, and a dragon. This may have been the first time I saw these guardians all together, but I was to come across this combination many times over the next decade. The most beautiful representation I came to see was in the Dubdi Gompa in Sikkim. At this time I didn’t know that the Yamantaka was a representation of the Manjushri Buddha, and the snake he eats is death.

I was completely wrong about the major part of the climb being over. The steepest part came after this. I have no record of this long climb because I had to put my camera into my backpack for a bit when I had to use my hands to steady myself. After that I was too tired to take it out again. I did not notice the soft sounds of wind through the pines and water dropping on rocks, things that The Family still remembers at times. I was completely out of breath when I reached the highest part of the route, all I noticed as I sat down on a rock parapet was that we were surrounded by prayer flags. The Family went over to the other side and realized that we were at a special place, where we could actually look down at the monastery. This was a pleasant view indeed.

We stopped here for a long while. The road dips down steeply beyond this, and a waterfall cascades between this mountain and the next one. We would cross between the two over a bridge and then walk up the next one into the monastery. It is not a long walk, but I had to prepare myself. This stage has two packs of territorial mountain dogs. They stand on the two mountains and bark at each other. I haven’t seen dogs with such a curly tail before. I paused to look at the flags when I noticed a moth sitting on one. As I took the photo you see here, The Family pointed out that the flags were full of moths of many different kinds. I was just beginning to learn to identify butterflies, but moths remained out of reach: then, as well as now. There are just too many kinds.

We went on down. The sound of the waterfall soon drowned out the barking of the dogs. There were Redstarts flying about near the water, flitting from stone to stone. We saw these birds for the first time in Bhutan, but were to see them many times later. The climb after this took all my breath away. I reached the monastery panting from the climb and sat down on the steps. Climbing those last few steps seemed too hard.

The last photo I have is the one above, taken just a little before the end of the last climb. I walked into the monastery, and must have seen some of it, but nothing remains in my memory. There was a major fire which destroyed Takstang monastery in 1998, ten years before our climb. The fire killed a monk and destroyed many old paintings and statues. What we saw was largely rebuilt with material brought up on the backs of men. What tremendous labour that is! Just a climb with a camera and water had tired me out so much.

It started to rain as we were up in the monastery. Someone suggested that we wait it out, but The Sullen Celt said it was not going to let up soon, and we should start off right now. She was right about the rain, but not about the walk. We made our way slowly back down to the waterfall and up again over rocks made slippery by the rain. Then, as we headed down through the forest the skies opened up and a really heavy rain started. The dirt track through the forest became a river of mud as we made our way down. We slid down parts of it and by the time we reached the bottom the rain had stopped and the sun was out. The warm sun baked hard the mud that we were now crusted in. It was a long time before we could get it off. We would do the climb again if we went there now.

Many things have been written about Thimphu. It is easy to find lists telling you the ten best things to do in Thimphu. All of them miss out on the most fun thing to do: play carrom at night with the locals. Back from Bumthang, we were feeling warm in Thimphu. After dinner we started looking for ice cream, and wandered into a street lined with carrom boards, all in use.

There were groups of young men playing. This is a game all of us had grown up playing, and it was fascinating. The Family noticed that there was no female player. "Why," she asked, and did not stay for an answer.

We stopped at some of the games to comment on the technique and play. We were not the only ones. Several boards were crowded with onlookers and kibitzers. In India, any carrom board attracts its share of people who give unwanted advice: kibitzers. Bhutan was no exception. If we knew Dzongkha we would have joined in. At some point we did discuss the finer points of strategy on one of the boards. Since we spoke English, and the players did not, we managed not to give away a national advantage.

If you are in Thimphu one night, you can have a good time joining one of these groups to play carrom.

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Now and then The Family asks me, "Why don’t we leave Mumbai and go live in the mountains?" The question is not always rhetorical. I have to suppress my impulses and give a rational answer, which is that "Living is hard at the heights we would like to live in".

There are few people, and fewer roads. Everything you want will have to be brought up from the plains. For a large part of the way it will come by truck. But eventually it will be brought up by horses, and at the very end by people. Can we do it? I don’t have to ask the rhetorical question, because we both know that the answer is no. We are good for ten days around an elevation of 4000 meters. Maybe we can stretch it to a few weeks, but then we would come back to the plains.

The beautiful and serene Kyichu Lhakhang, Bhutan’s oldest temple (photo above), stands right next to the cluster of buildings where I took the featured photo. This temple was built in the 7th century CE by the Tibetan king, and Padmasambhava is said to have visited the temple less than a century later. One of the wonderful stories about Kyichu Lhakhang is that the two orange trees which you can see inside apparently bear fruit all year round. Seeing the temple, and hearing these stories, one still has to remember that it was hard manual labour which built places like this.

When we left the Lhakhang and came back to Paro, our car fell in behind this pick-up truck. The temple dancers sitting in the back turned their masked head to look at me as I took photos. Which tsechu had we missed? The only dances in May are the Domkhar Tsechu and the Ura Yakchoe, both far away in Bumthang. I don’t think these masks were for either of those. If I knew the culture of Bhutan better I would have been able to tell from the masks which festival the two were dressed for. It has been a mystery to us. Perhaps another trip is called for; it has been nine years, after all.

Chele La is the highest motorable pass in Bhutan. We drove up here, 3810 meters above sea level, on a clear day. There was a clear view of the conical peak of Chomolari (Jomolhari), 3506 meters above us. Below us we could see the sun-dappled valleys of Paro and Haa. We had driven up through a road that wound through rhododendron forests, and had seen the spectacular colours of Khaleej pheasants for the first time.

I love the sense of calm at such heights. The sun was warm on my face, but the wind carried a biting chill. The wind blew through the massed prayer flags. The crack of blowing flags was a constant sound around us. There was a deep call of a raven, and I saw one come down to rest with its claws on the dagger of knowledge, completely oblivious to religion and revelation.

I walked down the road. A little way down was a chorten and next to it a heap of stones. At this height, your rational self can recede behind oxygen depletion. The magical longing to leave a little mark on the earth takes over, and you place another stone on the growing pile left by previous travellers.

I look at Chomolari and remember the two expeditions: one of 1937 and another of 1970, both over the southeast spur of the peak. The 1937 climb is described in a book. Dorjee Lhatoo and Prem Chand never wrote about their 1970 climb. I will never make a climb like this, not even over the newer routes pioneered more recently. But I sit on a cold grassy mound and dream about it.

I’m walking closer to the sky than I usually do: thoughts like this arise with hypoxic magic. On another rise is yet another group of flags. I walk between them. The wind is made visible, audible. Magic surrounds you. The fraying flags are supposed to release good wishes, calm and peace into the wind. These wash over you in gusts of the wind. Bhutan is supposed to top the world in Gross National Happiness. Can you doubt it when you stand so close to the sky?

If there is only one Dzong that you have time to visit when in Bhutan, there is no question that it should be Punakha. The wonderful location at the confluence of the Po Chhu (Papa river) and Mo Chhu (Mama river), the beautiful Jacaranda and Magnolia trees surrounding it, the exquisite woodwork and paintings (featured photo), and its renowned history, make this undisputedly the most beautiful Dzong in Bhutan. Don’t take my word for it. The present King was married in this Dzong, and all the kings have been crowned here.

The Punakha Dzong was constructed in 1637 at a site where an older and smaller Dzong stood since 1326. Construction was completed in 1638, and the gold dome was added in 1676. In the second courtyard (dochey) I saw several buildings with beautiful paintings. The one above shows a monk with his left hand, holding a lotus, extended in a gesture that wards off evil (karana mudra). I liked the painting because of the detailed study of black-necked cranes at the monk’s feet. I’, not able to identify who this could be. I guess he is a monk and not a celestial being by the fact that he has a halo, but it is brown in colour.

To reach this place we had to climb a steep set of stairs. It seems that this is protection against invaders as well as flood waters. The ladder that you see in this photo is apparently pulled up at night and the door behind it is locked. The ladder is so steep that I had to hold the handrail to climb up. The height is a protection against floods. Since Po Chhu is snow-fed, melt-water often floods in early spring. Even so, the Dzong has flooded several times in its history. The waters eventually cross the border into India and feed the Brahmaputra river. We spent a long time in the halls around the second dochey, admiring paintings and statues.

The two images here were taken because the light was good. They depict celestial beings of great power. This is clear from the green halos that surround their heads. Apart from that I’m clueless about who they can be. They are neither the Sakyamuni (since they do not hold a begging bowl) nor are they depictions of the Maitreya Buddha (since their feet do not rest on lotus flowers).

They are not Avalokiteshwara (since they are looking forward), nor are they Tara (since they are male). They do not hold a sword, so they are not Manjushri. They are not surrounded by flames, so they cannot be Mahakala or Vajrapani. Both are bearded, so they could be Padmasambhava. But I have no idea whether the Guru is depicted holding a musical instrument, as the one on the left does, or a prayer wheel, like the one on the right. The identified images of the Guru that I have seen show him with the Sakyamuni seated on the crown. That is not the case here. These could be someone else, but I like to think of them as the 8th century sage who brought Buddhism to the Himalayas.

This was the second time we visited the Punakha Dzong. Both times we arrived in May, and found the Jacaranda in bloom. The beautiful purple colour looks wonderful against the white walls of the Dzong. It would be nice to come back here in another season to see what it looks like.

Rice fields are easy to cross: there are narrow embankments along the edges, meant to trap the waters. We took these easy paths to cross stretches of fields, and reached the hillock below which Chimi Lhakhang stands. The monastery was built in 1499 and is dedicated to the "mad monk" Drukpa Kunley.

This disciple of Pema Lingpa is said to have subdued the demoness of Dhochu La with his Magic Thunderbolt of Wisdom and trapped her in a rock near the monastery. If you think about the fact that this is a place where women who want children come for the monk’s blessing, then you don’t need to see the wooden copy of the thunderbolt to figure out what it is. In any case, if you are interested, you can be blessed with a tap on the head with it.

The main shrine had interesting paintings and statues, including one of Drukpa Kunley and his dog. Unfortunately it was too dark, and the exposure required tested the steadiness of my hands. The only photo which I managed to take was of this gilded wooden representation of the Buddha. The lobby, on the other hand, was very well lit, and the monk at his rosaries there was clearly interested in our party of six. I should have paid more attention to the paintings on the walls. My memory is that they depicted monks and celestial beings surrounded by animals, being serenely cruel towards demons and other powerful evil creatures. I’m sure the old monk would have explained the meanings of these paintings. We were to see more such paintings later in the day.

Most holy places in Bhutan have burning lamps, and stores of ghee for lighting new lamps. The rooms are nice and warm when you come in from the outside, but also, because of that, smells of rancid ghee. We left the shrine and walked about the monastery. It was full of young novices at work making candles and the lotus-and-dagger wooden pieces which go on top of poles holding prayer flags. They seem to be pretty fired up by the teaching of Drukpa Kunley.

In her on-job avatar, The Sullen Celt had been bringing tour groups to Thimphu and Punakha every year. She was the one who had read up about Chimi Lhakhang and its tradition of Tantric teaching. Drukpa Kunley was a Tantric master who taught that sex and religion were inseparable. The oldest Tantric story I knew was of Kapalika, who, after her lover died and was cremated, smeared his ashes over her body as a mark of their union. In India the tradition remains mainly in temple sculptures showing sexual acts, but in Bhutan it is very alive. Phalluses were painted on walls of huts in villages nearby. The refusal to separate different aspects of life is a very healthy attitude.

However, Drukpa Kunley lived in medieval times, and his poems reveal that his attitude towards women was of his times. As tourists we met few urban people socially, so I was unable to find out how his teachings are interpreted today.

After reaching Lobeysa, we gave ourselves time to do nothing. After breakfast we decided to solve the mystery of the missing men, something that had puzzled us in Ura as well as Tang. The Sullen Celt wanted to walk to the fields that we saw across a small river. After surveying the distance, we voted to take the car part of the way.

The whole village was at work in the fields. Nine years back, the economy of Bhutan was clicking up. Hydroelectric power export and tourism were becoming a larger fraction of the economy, but most of the population was still involved in farming. Around a third of the economy came directly from agriculture. Almost all the working women worked in agriculture, as did almost two thirds of the working men. Lobeysa has water for irrigation, which instantly resulted in rice being the main crop.

Human culture is so centred on agriculture that it is hard to think of it as technology. But this was not how the original humans evolved. The little tribes of humans who walked across continents and land bridges exposed by the frozen seas of the last ice age were not farmers. They were hunters and foragers. Farming was invented in diverse parts of Asia during the explosion of plant life that followed the retreat of the ice. Converting virgin forest into farmland, shaping the landscape by tilling, diverting water for irrigation, planting, transplanting and harvesting rice are technologies as old as the settling of Asia.

Farming is backbreaking labour, whether it is carrying the rice paddies in a basket from one field to another (photo, above left), transplanting them in a flooded field (featured image), or tilling the field (above). When I look at this work now, I see in it an effort to recreate the soil conditions of the receding ice age in which Oryza sativa, rice, developed.

One major difference between this part of Bhutan and the Bumthang district is in the crops they cultivate. Bumthang has less irrigation, so the major crops there are millets like buckwheat and barley, or potatoes. On the other hand, the Butanese seem to love rice, so the better off one is, the more rice one eats. Economics is the same in all countries!

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Our time in Bhutan was coming to an end. We checked out of our hotel in Bumthang and spent the day driving to Lobeysa, a long drive. We passed again through the mixed forest on the way down, catching glimpses of the wonderfully greenish-blue Verditer Flycatchers (Eumyias thalassinus), black drongos with their forked tails (Dicurcus macrocercus) and the bright colours of Scarlet Minivets (Pericrocotus speciosus),

On our way up, we’d seen that there was no food on the road, so this time we packed lunch. When we stopped to eat we saw this interesting orchid poking out of the ground next to the road. I have no identification. Can anyone help?

At another stop we saw what looked like a piece of fungus growing on a stone (highlighted in the photo above). Then suddenly it began to move like a caterpillar, its body hunching in the little waves that propel a caterpillar forward. Before I could change the setting on my camera to take a video, the animal had disappeared into a crack in the stone. What a marvellous piece of camouflage. I wish I knew which moth this would develop into.

Then as we came lower we entered a zone of the forest full of Dendrobium fimbriatum orchids growing on trees. We probably caught them at the end of their flowering season, but they were spectacularly in bloom along kilometres of the road. We wondered how we’d missed seeing them on the way up. They are fairly common and can be found in many parts of India, the Himalayas, and south-east Asia. Still, it takes unspoiled forests of the kind that exist in Bhutan for it to bloom so spectacularly. Bhutan is estimated to have around 500 species of orchids, so we scarcely observed the surface of this immense diversity.

Many years later I came across the wonderful travel book called The Riddle of The Tsangpo Gorges by Frank Kingdom Ward which describes the flora of Tibet and the eastern Himalayas. As I begin to end the description of our trip through Bhutan nine years ago, the wonderful first line of the book comes to mind: "I have often observed that no matter how much I read about a foreign land before visiting it, I find by experience that it differs widely from what I expected."

Coincidentally, today is the 9th anniversary of the day we started our trip through Bhutan. So it is also nine years since the six of us met up with Dinesh, the man who would drive the car for us. He met us at the airport in Paro with a Toyota Innova which he’d driven up from Hashimara, the Indian railhead for road trips to Bhutan.

Dinesh was quiet and reserved when we met. The youngest in our party was The Joy, a bubbly birder, stopping at every sparrow (Passer rutilans). We halted thrice before we left the airport, and The Parent of Joy wondered how Dinesh would cope with this.

I sat in the seat next to the driver’s and tried to chat with him. He was from Bihar, and had left home to look for work immediately after he passed school. He learnt to drive, although he left the details vague, and soon found employment with a travel agent, driving in Bihar and Bengal. A few jobs later he was in Hashimara working for the travel agent I’d dealt with.

He opened up when I told him that I’d grown up in Bihar. It turned out that his parents were in their village, and his wife and children lived with him in Hashimara. "And school?" The Family asked. He would usually direct the answers to me, even when questions came from others. His older child, a girl, was going to school in Hashimara. "So she knows Bengali", I guessed. He said that he did too.

A decade ago few people would have thought of Dinesh as a migrant. After all, The Parent of Joy was a Tamil speaker who grew up in Kolkata and now worked in Mumbai. The Sullen Celt had family in Goa and grew up in Mumbai. Over the last decade, a new political story has grown to separate the seven of us who drove through Bhutan then. The six urban middle class professionals are seen as pan-Indian by some political parties, and are therefore invisible to their bigotry. Dinesh, unfortunately, is seen as an immigrant by the same parties, and reviled for taking away jobs from locals.

As we travelled through Bhutan, Dinesh began to take an interest in birds, and started spotting them very efficiently. The featured photo was taken soon after he spotted his first scarlet minivet (Pericrocotus speciosus) on the road from Mebar Tsho to Ura. I remember The Family trying to get him to smile as I took this photo.

The six of us were on a holiday, enjoying the ten days-long break, but Dinesh was at work. He had not elected to stay away from his family. Sometimes, when we met in the mornings, he would remark on the bad mobile reception. This meant that he had not managed to talk to his wife and children at night. At the end of the trip The Family asked him how long he would stay at home. Dinesh said he would be off on another trip after one night at home.

He was a very good driver, and I could see why his services would be in demand. One afternoon we decided to go off-road for a picnic lunch by a stream. It started raining hard soon after we’d opened up our backpacks. We ran back to the car. It continued to rain hard. Dinesh decided to drive back to the road, before we were stranded. The mud was so slippery that the tyres would not get a good grip. We helped him to ballast the car with rocks, and he drove slowly upwards over the undulating terrain until we got to the road. Later when The Father of Joy and I discussed this, we were both sure that this kind of driving was beyond us. When we got back to the road and congratulated him on his driving, he smiled.

As we left the usual tourist route of Paro, Thimphu and Punakha, he began to suggest little detours, interesting things to see on the way, and hotels which we could try out. He had us figured out, because his suggestions always appealed to us. He remained in this relaxed mood when we drove to Phuentsholing, crossed back to India, and he dropped us at the railway station in Hashimara. We shook hands, and never saw him again. Sometimes, The Family and I say to each other, "I hope Dinesh is doing well"